About once a day, my external USB drive will lock up. The activity light usually comes on solid when it happens and just stays like that, but not every time. It's a 3.5" 1TB drive formatted EXT2 in an external enclosure, I've use it with my past Linux servers for over a year. Both on USB and ESATA. I'm using it in USB mode right now, since my plug doesn't have ESATA yet. When the drive locks up, I have to stop the 3 processes I have that are trying to use it (MediaTomb, Samba and Transmission) then umount the drive, power cycle it, run e2fsck on it, mount it, and restart the processes. It's annoying to say the least. I've lost a couple files thanks to file system corruption. I just need this problem to be solved. Any suggestions? I'm running 2.6.32.2, I'm more than happy to update if it's simply a glitch in this particular version of the kernel. I haven't seen anything of note in syslog, but if there's another log file worth looking at, I'll more than happily post that to help track down this problem.I don't think this is a hardware problem, because as I've said, I've never had this problem with this drive/enclosure in the many many many months I've been using it in the past. And I don't think it's normal, because people on here are running their root file system on external USB drives without this problem.. Maybe I should just swap my kernel.. I hope it's just a glitch in this version of the kernel..

I am having the same problem with a 1TB WD drive formatted ext3 with kernel 2.6.30.2 on Debian Squeeze. Everything works until I start to access the drive through a samba share or the drive sits idle for awhile. Then I am able to see the drive, but it becomes read only until it finally locks up the system, forcing a reboot by the reset button. That fixes the problem a few times, but eventually, the drive becomes corrupted and the system will not boot while it is connected. I unplug the drive and can restart the system with no problem. I then plug the drive back in and get the following errors:

The drive has worked fine with other Ubuntu and windows systems, but after the above happens, I cannot access the drive with them at all. The only way I can get any access to the drive is by using a Gparted Live CD to repartition it and then it will work again until I try to use it with the plug.

Sounds like you're problem is hitting a whole lot more often and a whole lot harder than mine. As for me, I'm just going to bide my time till I can get an ESATA equipped SheevaPlug (GuruPlug, whatever).. Seems like the best way around this issue. Not to mention it'll seriously improve the plug's NAS throughput..

Yep that is the big advantage of the Esata version, but I`m greedy I want to use the Esata for boot and add more drive(s) via the usb , which isn`t going very well at all.Wanting ntfs is adding even more problems to my pile.

The plug wouldn't boot with the USB drive connected again, so I unplugged it and was able to boot. I plugged the drive back in and and the system said to run e2fsck on it. Did that and everything works again, including booting with it attached.

I can read the files on the drive via samba with no problems. Writing to the drive, not so good. Most of the time when I try to transfer a file (approx 1 GB) via samba, the transfer starts but then hangs and the connection times out. After repeated tries (I haven't kept count), the drive will go read only and I can't boot with it attached.

The drive is a self powered 1TB WD MyBook, and I think the problem may be with the drive and not the plug, as it does the same thing on my x86 Ubuntu system. I reformatted it NTFS and it seems to work fine with Win 7.

I found an older 120 GB WD Passport usb powered drive lying around and it is working fine with the plug. Transfer speeds are a little slow, but it is not crashing or locking up like the MyBook.